Crip Futurity, notably popularized by Alison Kafer and Robert McRuer in Feminist, Queer, Crip, is a term meant to challenge the predominant conceptualization of disability as a condition that is incompatible with future and future existence, either through causing the end of one's life or as something that humanity will eventually overcome. Crip Futurity comes out of Kafer asking the question of what would it mean to imagine futures that actively and radically include disabled people, and may be even shaped by disabled people.

Crip Futurity

In "Feminist, Queer, Crip" Alison Kafer reflects on the history of the cyborg as both framed as a figure of futurist feminist critique by scholars like Donna Haraway, but also as a space of militarization, colonization and institutionalization. While Haraway frames the cyborg as an example how breaking down binaristic categories between human and animal, and human an machine may lead us to a more livable future, Kafer discusses how Harawary's analysis can be read as devoid of looking at how cyborgs, in the science-fiction imaginary and in actuality have been used as tools of militarization, colonization and institutionalization through the imagination of cyborgs as figures like Robocop and Terminator, the presentation of cyborgification as a cure for disability, and how the rhetoric of cyborgs was used in the mid-20th century in discussion around the involuntary psychiatric drugging of institutionalized patients.

Example of Queer Futurity Reinscribing Harm - Cyborgs

Price highlights that Thick Temporality becomes even more pertinent when talking about theories of Crip Time including Alison Kafer's discussion of crip time that highlights how while we image crip futurity to leave behind the history of harm, abuse, colonization and slavery that are central to modern and historic definitions of the formation of disability, futurity my reinscribe these things. 

University of Wisconsin - Madison

Thick Temporality is defined by Walker as understanding how the past and future are emeshed in a matter through what we imagine to be the present.

Thick Temporality

Crip Time is a term coined by Ellen Samuels, Allison Kafer, and Margaret Price to explain how disabled or crip bodymind embodiments often have different experiences with time. In particular Samuels, Kafer, and Price pose crip time as an alternative framing of time to counter how disabled individuals often have to place great strains on their bodyminds to meet nondisabled timetables - meet deadlines, be seen as at a similar stage of life to nondisabled peers, work similar 9-5 positions. These timelines fail to understand why disabled bodies' experiences may not be able to nicely fit these expectations. Crip time offers a temporal framing that makes the clock fit the disabled bodymind rather than making the disabled bodymind fit the clock.

Crip Time

Price, M. (2024). Crip Spacetime. Duke University Press.

Crip Spacetime

Kafer, Alison. (2013). Feminist, Queer, Crip. Indiana University Press. 978-0-253-00934-0. 

Feminist, Queer, Crip

Thick Temporality and Crip Time

Higher education, also has non-disabled temporal expectations ingrained and promoted by the institution. These expectations often come up in expectations of how long a student should take to go from matriculation to graduation - which often has financial ties to amounts of scholarships, and institutional ties to how long faculty and administrative staff expect to be working with a student, the institutionalized rhythm of a semester or quarter, the pace of coursework, or the idealized temporal expectations around how students should show up in the class room or approach academic assignments. Disabled students are expected to keep up with this timeline.

The Non-Crip Temporalities of Academia

Crip authenticity refers to practices that center the fluid nature of disability and time that reject ableist assumptions that prescribe normative assumptions for how people are supposed to inhabit their bodies and engage with space and time. Crip authenticity recognizes disability as fluid both throughout a person's lifespan and when individuals move from one context to another.

Crip Authenticity

Slow Professoring, introduced by Maggie Bergs and Barbara K. Seeber, is a proposed way of asserting Crip Spacetime and Crip Time within academic spaces that often punish slowness by centering deliberation and slowness over acceleration in academic work.

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